Intel gets into the news business

Intel has launched its own news site—not a venue for thinly disguised press …

Intel has now launched what looks to be the semiconductor industry's answer to the venerable in-flight magazine: Free Press, a "news" site hosted and published by Intel. It's sort of like Delta Sky magazine, but with a more direct and pervasive focus on Intel. The new site hosts byline-less articles on topics that range from Moore's Law, to the retirement of a recent top Intel engineer, to a spa near Intel's Ireland fab.

But lest you think that Intel won't use Free Press as a platform for aggressively pushing (and pushing back against) specific stories, the lead story on the site Wednesday gives a solid indication of the kind of heavy PR lifting that the company will do with the new outlet. Specifically, the article takes a solid whack directly at the "tablets are cannibalizing netbooks" idea that has become the tech topic du jour. And when we say "solid whack," the writer actually went out and did a lot of bona fide reporting on the topic. There are the obligatory quotes from analysts at Gartner and ABI Research, along with data from analyst reports. But the writer also quotes conference panel sessions, which he or she presumably attended, and uses material from on-the-record interviews with writers at a number of other press outlets. Intel went beyond dressing up a press release or a set of talking points in news drag.

The fact that Intel is apparently using real journalists for this site probably answers the question of why there are no bylines on the articles. PRish work of this sort is very lucrative for reporters, but it's the kiss of death for a serious journalism career. Once you sell your soul like that, it's hard to get regular work again. (But if you're good at flacking, the pay is massively better.) So it's probably easier for Intel to get talent to write for the site if they don't have to put their name on it.

Free Press's commitment to doing work that looks and smells like journalism goes beyond the aforementioned reportorial diligence, and it has driven the outlet to adopt some journalistic tropes and tics that can seem comically out-of-place. For instance, the opening line of an article on the retirement of Intel's Kevin Kahn reads, "Technologist Kevin Kahn has made countless friends within Intel Corporation and the industry over the course of a 34-year career that is coming to a close, Intel Free Press has learned."

"Has learned"? Really?

If Free Press continues to do real (if agenda-driven) reporting on current tech topics, it raises the question of how tech news outlets should treat it. Should Free Press be ignored, even if it does good work? Is it fair to always flag the site with a construction like "the Intel-owned Free Press"—what about "the GE-owned NBC News"? Right now, the answer to the latter question is a little easier, because Intel itself specifically brands the site as a PR entity. But who knows where things could go next? Some say that corporate-sponsored PR is the future of journalism. Others say it's the present reality, and that Intel is only being up-front about it. We report, you decide.